Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
would follow in the fall). When their former henchmen, the Ku Klux Klan, fought back with bombs, the Kennedys were forced to send federal troops to the city. The president, who had devoted a meager two sentences to civil rights in his earlier State of the Union address, asked Congress in mid June for a comprehensive ban on discrimination in public accommodation.31
The unexpected breakthrough in Birmingham galvanized Black communities across the country to follow its example. “The police dogs and fire hoses,” the Eagle’s Grace Simons pointed out, “did more in a day to advance the movement of revolt than had a thousand sermons.”32 Indeed, if mass activism is measured by the sheer number of protests and arrests, the summer of 1963 was unquestionably the high point of the civil rights struggle. From June to September, the Department of Justice “catalogued a total of 1,412 separate civil rights demonstrations around the country.”33 The national NAACP—faced with demands from its own youth for more militancy and fearing that CORE might seize civil rights leadership in key cities—uncharacteristically moved into a direct action mode in May.
In Los Angeles, nonetheless, CORE was first to act, organizing a four-mile march on May 10 from Vernon and Central Avenues in South Central (the location of the legendary “Dolphin’s of Hollywood” record store) to city hall, where James Baldwin, then on a grueling CORE-sponsored speaking tour, told the crowd of 2,000 that “discrimination against the Negro is the central fact of American life.” With other speakers, he condemned the Justice Department for watching from the sidelines while Bull Connor’s storm troopers terrorized and jailed children. In a telegram sent from L.A., he reminded the attorney general that “those who bear the greatest responsibility for the chaos in Birmingham are not in Birmingham. Among those responsible are J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Eastland, the power structure which has given Bull Connor such license, and President Kennedy who has not used the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be.”34 (Two weeks later he aggressively confronted the younger Kennedy during a meeting at Harry Belafonte’s apartment in Manhattan. Bobby was so unsettled by the exchange that he ordered J. Edgar Hoover to tap Baldwin’s phone.)35
CORE suddenly found itself with scores of new members. “Birmingham,” one LA organizer wrote to the national office, “has done the recruiting for us.”36 It also attracted unexpected new allies. The Cal Tech YMCA, for example, voted to participate in CORE’s campaign against housing segregation in Torrance and Dominguez Hills, while a group of young women teachers organized the “Friendship Guild” to organize dances and other fundraisers for CORE.37
L.A.’s NAACP chapter, for its part, began planning a massive Freedom Rally for Birmingham on May 26 at Wrigley Field. Dr. Christopher Taylor, the dentist who had succeeded Reverend Maurice Dawkins as the president of the local NAACP, sent a telegram to Bull Connor asking him to relay a speaking invitation (“send reply collect”) to the jailed comedian and movement stalwart Dick Gregory. Gregory promptly made bail and flew to L.A. Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy changed tour schedules to attend the LA rally, and Governor Pat Brown acted as honorary chair, as he had when King spoke at the Sports Arena in 1961. Sammy Davis Jr. agreed to wrangle celebrities (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Rita Moreno, Dorothy Dandridge, Tony Franciosa and Mel Ferrer, among others), while Burt Lancaster volunteered to organize an after-rally party in Beverly Hills to squeeze money out of them. That Sunday’s turnout of 35,000 to 40,000 was phenomenal, dwarfing the legendary King rallies of November 1960 and June 1961.
In King’s “The Time Is Now” speech, he called upon President Kennedy to personally escort onto campus the two Black students that the courts had ordered admitted to the University of Alabama but Governor Wallace had blocked from entering. He received his most rapturous applause, however, when he urged the crowd to emulate Birmingham and unite to fight every form of segregation and discrimination in Los Angeles: “Birmingham or Los Angeles, the cry is always the same: We want to be free.”38 In making the equation between the two cities, King only echoed what Malcolm X had said the year before, and Baldwin a few weeks earlier. (Baldwin: “There is not one step, one inch … no distance between Birmingham and Los Angeles.”39)
The interracial committee that organized the rally was soon nominated to lead such a struggle when Reverend Dawkins warned the Times that if immediate steps were not taken to desegregate L.A., the NAACP and its allies would launch a “Birmingham-type drive.” “We are not just asking for a small specific adjustment,” he declared, “but a total community integration.” Whether Dawkins, who constantly sought the limelight of the media, actually spoke with the full permission of the coalition is unclear, but his statement was catalytic.40 The official founding of the UCRC took place at a closed meeting of numerous groups under NAACP auspices on June 4. Predictably, Dr. Taylor was elected chairperson, although he would often be upstaged by the coalition’s president: the dynamic young African Methodist Episcopal minister H. H. Brookins, who, through his close alliance with newly elected council member Tom Bradley and his success in building a superchurch with an estimated 19,500 members, eventually became one of the city’s most important power brokers.41
Although the united front was originally called the NAACP-UCRC, the ACLU was an equally important player. Indeed, ACLU director Eason Monroe claimed in his 1974 oral history that
[we] played a dominant role in organizing [it], and a dominant role in holding [it] together for a period of a year and a half or two years, when other groupings in the community had more limited resources than the ACLU had by that time, and when, as a matter of fact, the fate of that organization [UCRC] rested, in a very important sense, upon ACLU involvement.
He also emphasized the failure of the UCRC to bring to the fore any leader of real stature apart from Reverend Brookins, clearly implying the incompetence of Dr. Taylor.42 Monroe, however, did not clarify in these interviews whether this critique was one he had directly expressed in executive meetings of the UCRC or simply the wisdom of hindsight. CORE, in contrast, was openly skeptical of the NAACP from the beginning. Irked by the NAACP’s sudden assertion of seniority, spokesman Danny Grey pointedly reminded a Times reporter that CORE was already waging a “Birmingham-type” campaign. But he could hardly demur when Taylor, acknowledging the “tremendous pressures from the Negro community ‘to do something right now,’” promised that the UCRC was “determined to mount an all-out offensive in the areas of racial discrimination in job opportunities and housing, de facto school segregation and the abuse of police.”43
Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, the elder of what would become Los Angeles’s most important political dynasty, represented a large portion of the Black community and was the first to react to the UCRC’s emergence. He urged the County Human Relations Commission to set up an emergency meeting between the organizers and the Los Angeles “power structure” (the CHRC’s term). With city government almost paralyzed by relentless warfare between Yorty and a majority of the council, the county Board of Supervisors became the sponsors of a summit at the Statler Hilton on June 7 in order “to avert a spread of racial tension”: a euphemism for the large-scale urban disorder or violence that they feared might be imminent.44 About half of the 150 civic and business leaders invited to the Hilton conference actually attended, mostly to sit in uncomfortable silence as Wendell Green, editor of the Sentinel, “asserted there is more racial segregation in Los Angeles than in any city in the South and more than in any large Northern city except Chicago and Cleveland.”
Dr. Taylor, in turn, outlined proposals for a citizens review board for the LAPD, revision of school district boundaries to achieve integration, and a nondiscrimination clause in all government contracting. The attendees were urged to support the Rumford fair housing bill in the legislature, and if it failed to pass, to adopt muscular city and county fair housing ordinances. “Birmingham-style demonstrations,” Taylor explained, would be postponed for ten days to allow business and government leaders to respond with concrete proposals for ending discrimination in their respective areas of education, law enforcement, housing and employment. Task forces in each area, coordinated by CHRC, were set up.45 But the newly born UCRC was making demands from the cradle without proof that it could actually organize civil disobedience on a Birmingham scale, or, conversely, keep control over spontaneous protest in the community.